A community for news and discussion of Seattle, Washington and the surrounding area
Washington state must push as hard as we can away from any Project 2025 garbage.
Vote by mail and/or vote by online. Ranked choice voting. Pro abortion ... I'm tired of pro-choice weasel words. I am strongly in favor of women having the right to control their bodies. Single payer health care. And we should offer to buy Idaho as a Washington state franchise.
Pomme et pomme de terre ensemble pour toujours!
I agree with everything up to Idaho. Washington and Montana were deliberately built around Idaho for good reason! ;)
Ranked-choice is a far better system. Hope this passes.
Portland tried it, the results were not what anyone expected:
I read that interview, and there was plenty of education with how the ranked choice voting worked, and it seemed like the issue wasn't with ranked choice voting at all.
The issue was that now that multiple candidates (~15), people weren't sure who they wanted to vote for. Since it wasn't just a "favorite" out of two people after the primaries, people needed more education on who all the candidates were. That seems like an easy fix though as long as people can visit a single website or get a brochure in the mail listing who all the candidates are.
That seems like an easy fix though as long as people can visit a single website or get a brochure in the mail listing who all the candidates are.
I don't know about Oregon, but we already do this in Washington. We are 100% mail-in elections, and when your ballot comes in the mail, you also get a voter's pamphlet with information on all the measures and candidates. Or at least all the ones that bother to submit information. A few election cycles back, the Republican nominee for governor missed the deadline to submit a statement form, so the pamphlets mailed out to voters had a blank page for him. The campaign blamed it on a fault with their email server, but based on the level of competence in their campaign overall, I suspect someone just fucked up.
All that said, you can lead a horse to water... but you can't make a voter educate themselves. There are still plenty of people who don't bother to read the voter's pamphlets.
Yeah, I'm in the district that had 1/5 voters just skip that section. I sat down with the voter's pamphlet and online resources to figure out who my top 6 were.
Fortunately, eliminating the fringe candidates was dead simple. But I did find, one of my chosen candidates actually had dropped out and wasn't on the ballot. Had to pick a #7 and move everyone up by 1.
Do you do this weird? Pretty sure you don't have to fill it all out. Can stop after 1 if that's who you want.
You can, but if the choice is to rank a top 6, only voting for one defeats the purpose of ranked choice voting.
I'm a firm believer that our current method locks us into a two party system. It sounds like there may be some lessons learned we could take away here. I think Alaska also tried RCV?
Yup, Alaska has it and maintains it after this election. It was put up to a vote and passed.
Interesting thing about the Portland vote, they found the ranked choice voting wouldn't have made a difference compared to first past the post. The results would have been the same either way.
“What we saw in Portland’s recent elections, both for mayor and for City Council, is that any voting method likely would have elected the same set of people."
That being said, this election in Portland was an oddball for a variety of reasons:
We threw out our entire system of city government and started over.
We added ranked choice balloting.
City Council members were elected 3 at a time in 4 districts (total of 12) via rank 6 voting.
Mayor was also a result of rank 6.
Could it be that the candidates that didn't make it just needed better messaging? I would hypothesize over time that we may start seeing more drift away from the two familiar parties, but only when the voters are engaged and informed of their choices?
Oh, no, 1/5 voters in my district skipped that section entirely and didn't vote for anyone(!) In an election where the top 3 would win!
Apparently they also didn't randomize the ballot order, so a bunch of people ended up picking the first guy on the list as one of their backups. Luckily it wasn't enough to win because I guess he was one of the crazies.
I wish you the best. The NIMBYs in Colorado shot it down
